Women's History Month: women's rights

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching by Chrystal N. Feimster

The most widely recognized -- and widely reviled -- portrayal of the postbellum South is a silent film by D.W. Griffith.  Premiering under the title The Clansman, we know it today as The Birth of a Nation.  In the film, Griffith shares an intensely racist and heavily romanticized narrative of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded in 1865 as a means to terrorize the black population in the South into submission.  In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith employed several archetypal characters that, due to a sustained campaign of fear-mongering and violence, became firmly entrenched in the mythos of the post-War South: the avenging white knight, the chaste and delicate Southern woman, the treacherous mulatto woman, and the brutish ravaging black man.  It is these archetypal characters that provided white Southerners a means of justifying the widespread and horrific practice of lynching black men, women, and children.

In Southern Horrors, Chrystal N. Feimster explores this dark period in the history of the United States through the lens of what the postbellum South and the practice of lynching meant for women, and in particular what it meant for Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ida B. Wells.  They could not have come from more different backgrounds -- Felton, the daughter of wealthy slave owners, was raised to be the mistress of her future husband's plantation, and Wells was born into slavery the year before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was delivered.  Despite their differences, and despite their differing approaches to what each of them saw as the solution to the problem of lynching and mob rule, they had quite a lot in common.  They were both suffragists, journalists, and activists, and when they saw how precarious the safety of women in the South had become, they took up the banner of the cause and didn't set it down until the day they died.

In the years during the war and immediately following it, Felton saw the practice of raping women as something that all women needed protection from, regardless of social class or skin color.  When her "radical" views proved damaging to her husband's budding political career, however, she shifted her focus for the sake of expediency to focus only on seeking protection for white women.  Felton, an unabashed white supremacist all her life, was not afraid of invoking the nightmare figure of the fictional "black rapist" if it bought her cause popular support.  In a now infamous speech made in 1897, Felton claimed that women left alone on rural farms were in imminent danger from roving black rapists and murderers, and that the only solution was to lynch "a thousand a week if necessary."  The corollary, white men raping black women, was popularly thought to be the fault of the black women's loose morals and base natures, and Felton had no qualms about using this imagery either.  In the years that followed, however, her views on the nature of rape -- and the appropriate response to accusations of rape -- swung back toward the progressive end of the spectrum, and over twenty years after her lynching speech, she wrote an impassioned article decrying the disparities in sentencing and punishment between black and white offenders.  By calling lynching an "atrocity," she placed herself firmly in the anti-lynching camp, and re-embraced her previous view that the greatest danger to southern women of either race was white men.

Ida B. Wells, by contrast, was born a decade later into an unstable and tumultuous atmosphere.  She came of age in the time of Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs, when accusations of rape and attempted rape made by white girls and women in the morning were enough to have the accused strung up in a tree and riddled with bullets by the time the sun had set.  Wells saw firsthand the deplorable condition that former slaves and their children suffered under in a post-slavery Mississippi.  Former slave owners no longer had reason to value the black man or woman as a commodity, and as a direct result vented their spleen in increasingly violent and disturbing ways upon the people who had once been their "property."  The lynching of three of Wells' friends in Memphis in 1891 set her on the path that would become her life's work.  After moving to Chicago, she published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that explored the motivations behind the lynching of black men.  Wells quite rightly surmised that the explanation given for most lynchings -- to avenge the honor of white women raped by black men -- was a tale spun from whole cloth to hide the true intentions behind the violent act: to continue the disenfranchisement of the black race.  Black progress threatened white supremacists' ideas of black inferiority.  Wells exhorted black men and women to defend themselves: "The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched."


Change would not be seen until the very end of either of their lives, and the fight for both racial and gender equality would continue long after their deaths.  But they both made significant contributions to the anti-lynching crusade -- Wells through investigative journalism, political activism, and as a founding member of both the NACW and the NAACP, Felton by taking her enormous political cachet and standing as a wealthy white woman to work for reform from within.